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tim!: End of the Year Closeout Sale!
2001
Things that make me stop and look in astonished amazement.
Oni:
I am pumping gas in Sanford, NC, getting ready to drive the drive. Enter a small car. Ford Festiva, four door model, too little to call a sedan. The car is unnaturally green. As the car rolls into the lot, it has music blaring out of its open windows. I notice the car is full. It stops. All four doors open and four giant people climb out. If this were a 1970 Volkswagen Bug, we would suddenly be transported to the circus ring. This should be an ad for the Ford people. Any Ford people watching - this one is officially For Sale.
These guys transcend big. If I were to stand next to any one of them, I would be dwarfed and start having feelings of inadequacy run through my head. I am 6'2". Think Andre the Giant here. As they release themselves from the auto, its frame rises at least six inches. If the car could speak, it would first groan and then launch into a comedic monologue going on and on about the size of these guys, and don't they have anything better to do than ride around all day testing the limits of this dwarf-car, stopping only to get more gas and Mt. Dew?
It wouldn't be funny or even visually appealing if these apes had arrived in a Cadillac or a minivan, like they should have. I want to give them money and put them 2x2 on two tandem bikes, and then take their photo.
Du:
Last summer me and the family went to Ocean City, NJ to see about the beach. I drive up with my Brother, his wife, and their two kids. We drive. We drive some more. We stop to eat at The Cracker Barrel. The Cracker Barrel is an Interstate restaurant whose main theme appears to be old-west style with an overwhelming amount of country charm crud littering the walls and counter spaces. I have been there twice. Today at The Cracker Barrel there has just been deposited an entire busload of senior citizens. As we pull up, my brother tells me to run hurry and get in there to reserve a table before this throng of older citizens gets in the way and clogs up the works. I'm no athlete, but I can beat anyone over 75 in a race.
I get up to the front door just as about 15 of these bus people are getting there. Each and every one of them has a walker. I hold the door open for them for what I realize later to have been three very good reasons. The first is I'm a nice guy who on this day was feeling respective to his elders. Secondly, if anyone charges me to run hurry anywhere, I am automatically going to casually stroll to my perceived destination. And lastly, and most of all the best, as I'm holding the door open for this ever growing line of Grandmothers and Grandfathers, I notice that on each of their walkers' feet there resides a tennis ball. The modern walker has four legs. Some have two legs and two wheels. These had four legs. All legs on all walkers before my eyes have a tennis ball covering the end. And these are not old, used-up tennis balls which are brown and have no hair left. These are the bright, almost fluorescent yellow kind that are purchased new. I imagine they would smell like new tennis balls had I fallen to my knees before these people and begun sniffing the ends of the legs of their collective walkers. Perhaps the easier solution would be to knock one of them down, assume possession of the walker, upend it so that the bright fluorescent tennis ball rests snugly up against both nostrils and inhale deeply.
I'm not sure about what goes around, comes around; but if it even comes around a tiny bit after a stunt like that, your ass is so severely grass, you may as well begin to smooch it goodbye right after the tennis ball is restored to its original position.
These people went to the store and got two new packs of tennis balls each. 3+3 = 6. They only need four. So you wonder what happened to the other 2 tennis balls. Maybe they shared. Maybe they save them in case of a flat. Then they all sat around a table, each with a knife in his or her hand and systematically cut a slot into each ball, so that it would fit nicely on the end of the walker leg. How many finger tips lost, how many liver spots sliced in half before someone helped these people? One can only imagine. It turns out that all of these people were headed only for the Cracker Barrel Bathroom and had no intention of eating there.
Kvar:
I'm skipping Tri (Esperanto for three) because Kvar (Esperanto for four) is so much cooler and I'm not sure if I'll get to Kvar the natural way.
Things overheard in the false security of a cubicled office.
The winner for 2001 is from my boss who had found this baby squirrel and brought it home to care for it. Every few days there would be an update on the progress of the squirrel. At first the updates were pretty tame. Oh, what did she call that thing. It was Chestnut or something. Good enough. Chestnut one day apparently had some serious constipation and had to be given a squirrel enema of sorts to clear the blockage. What this amounted to was a warm compress over the abdominal area. More of an external enema.
The next was the release of Chestnut's sex drive with a q-tip story. Apparently adolescent squirrels can get out of control if they don't get some relief. Like they will bite you if they are too horny instead of just humping your leg like a dog. I'm not sure where I stand on the choices here. Rabies vs. an animal finishing off on your leg. So it came to be that my boss used a q-tip to force Chestnut to ejaculate, and thus to calm the hell down. He ran away.
Kvin:
My realtor and I and the Inspector Guy were at my house-to-be recently, looking at everything for the official inspection. Realtor Guy starts talking about the most recent computer virus attack, and how this is bad, and how this may effect this and that. ok ok. And the people whose house this is have two cats. They are both fluffy. One is white and one is grayish. The gray one is very freaked that we are here. The white one is kind of into it; at least you can look at it and it will hold its ground. Apparently out of boredom, Realtor Guy starts to chase the gray cat around the house that will soon be my house in what appears to be an effort to get him/her and pet him/her. Of course the gray cat is totally freaked by this and begins to run, not knowing that this will cause Realtor Guy to hasten his chase.
He gets around once when the white cat falls into line in between the two. So now we have first gray cat being chased by white cat being chased by Realtor Guy. While the chase is on, Realtor Guy is making chase noises which are indescribable. He gets around twice before Inspector Guy yells in a very uninterested way, almost to the wall and not to Realtor Guy, for him to stop chasing the damn cats. Like he doesn't care either way, he just wanted to say the words. Like this is no surprise, since it happens every time there is an inspection. I think RG felt a little remorse for this move when I gave him a look of disinterestedness combined with the surreal realization that I just watched my realtor - who is older than I - chase two cats around the house which is soon to be mine. I wonder now: What if he had gotten a hold of the gray cat, the object of his affection?
